Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Es s ays o n th e S u b lim e
Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu lskiego
Katowice 1994
T h e M o s t S u b l i m e A c t
Es s ays o n t h e S u b l i m e
Prac e Nau ko we
Uni we rs yt e t u l s ki e go
w Kat o wi c ac h
nr 1393
T h e M o s t S u b l i m e A c t
Es s ays o n t h e S u b li m e
Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu lskiego
Katowice 1994
Edi t o r o f t h e S e ri e s
Hi s t o ry o f Fo re i gn Li t e rat u re s
A LEKS A NDER A BA M OWICZ
Re vi e we r
WIES A W KRA JKA
T ab l e o f Co nt e nt s
Foreword 7
Noel GRAY
GEOMETRY and the SUBLIME:
Imagination and the Closure of Creativity * 11
t Liliana BARAKOSKA, Magorzata NITKA
A Reading of Distance in the Kantian Sublime 21
:Tadeusz SAWEK
Sublime Labours: Blake, Nietzsche and the Notion of the Sublime 28
Claire HOBBS
William Blake and Walter Benjamin: Under the Sign of the Sublime 43
; Tadeusz RA CHWA
The Unnameable. Representations) of the Sublime m50
Emanuel PROWER
The Sublime and C.S. Peirce's Category of Firstness 59
Marek KULISZ
Sublime, the Unclear m 68
Andrzej WICHER
Piers Plowman, the Sublime 74
David J ARRETT
The Downmarket Visionary Gleam: Popular Fiction and the Sublime 97
CZbigniew BIAAS
Multitude of Ecstatic Butterflies: A Glimpse of the Sublime in Kitsch 111
J erzy SOBIERAJ
Towards Unity. Melvilles Pictures of Civil War 120
'M arta ZAJ C
Witkacy's Pure Form and the Concept of the Sublime 126
Paul COATES
The Look into the Sky: Notes on Sublimity, Film and Gender 136
Streszczenie 14*
Rsum 152
Foreword
Even if the story of the concept of the sublime is, as Marek Kulisz argues in
one of the papers in this book, a story of a certain mistake or mistranslation of
the Greek peri hypsous into its Latin equivalent, yet the sublime remains an
intriguing notion penetrating the areas of both aesthetics and ethics. And the
very fact of a possibly erroneous choice of name for a concept does not
interfere with the concepts productivity; in this respect the sublime would
provide another proof, after Heideggers unconcealment of the interlingual
distortions of logos forcefully confined to the place of reason, of the profound
indebtedness of Western philosophy to the Babelian operation of (mis)
translation. It is perhaps for this reason that this volume, from the very outset,
falls short of any precise definition of the sublime. Rather, it (mis) translates this
category into a number of discourses ranging from philosophical, via literary,
to a cross-cultural look into the domains of art and arts.
I t is this positioning of the sublime at the intersection of the philosophical
and aesthetic (let us remember Blakes famous aphorism from The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell according to which The most sublime act is to set another
before you) which early on activated in this concept various meaning
generating protocols. Kants two statements from his analysis of the dynamic
of the sublime seem to be trail blazing: in the first one the philosopher bridges
the gap between ontology (things which are there, a landscape) and aesthetics
(To call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do, merely by what the
eye reveals if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by
heavens; if it is stormy, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything), in
the other he grafts ethical reflection upon the aesthetic (A feeling for the
sublime in nature cannot well be thought without combining therewith
a mental disposition which is akin to the moral).
This volume begins with two essays on Kant and his presentation of the
sublime as a spectacle of stone and distance, the dramatic highlight of which is
a certain crucial blindness of the power to imagine, a paradox of geometrical
imagination deprived of adequate geometric signs. Hence the oxymoronic
paradox of geometry of irregularity implicit in the idea of the idea closure
announced by Kants blind imagination, as Noel Gray puts it in his paper, by
the imagination which closes its eyes, as it were, to boundlessness and infinity
translating (or perhaps (mis) translating) them into the idea-infinity in which
human reason can still grasp, and thus also regulate, all irregularities in
a geometrical fashion an idea now reverberating in Fractal geometry which
claims to be the geometry of what we see and feel.
What is thus also at stake in the Kantian notion of the sublime is a certain
petrification of the infinite and the irregular which inaugurates the distance
between man and monumental nature, nature translated into a monument
which we should not approach too close lest it should lose its monumentality
and become a threat, the full emotional effect which, in Kant, always calls for
regulation/discipline of distance (Liliana Barakoska, Magorzata Nitka). Yet,
rather than securely living in the domestic (orderly regulated) space of home of
beauty (beauty is a peace-keeping force), Kant goes to war so as to avoid the
effeminating effects of peace, and to prove the distancing power of reason in the
face of the sublime/enemy. War is not quite sublime for Kant, it only has
something sublime about it provided it is conducted with order and a sacred
respect for the rights of civilians. I t is exactly in homecoming from a war
(between the faculties, for instance) that Kants philosophical strategy finds
a security of position (both epistemological and ontological) thus averting his
eyes from both the beautiful as too orderly and the sublime as too
dangerous so as to himself elude being turned to stone in the face of Isis, the
returning figure of Kants writings.
Herman Melville, as J erzy Sobieraj argues in his essay on Battle Pieces,
qualifies the war with somewhat similar hesitation. On the one hand it
endorses the sublime by being a terrible tragedy of our time and, on the other
hand, precisely due to the Kantian lack of respect for the rights of civilians it
becomes morally suspect and thus alienates itself from the moral disposition of
the sublime. I t is this double qualification of our times as not only
a tragedy but also as the terrible that puts the category of the sublime in
question in Melvilles Battle Pieces.
What somehow negatively links the philosophy of Blake and Nietzsche
with Kant (or Burke) is Blakes and Nietzsches denial that the sublime and the
beautiful are two distinct things or categories. For Blake, as Tadeusz Sawek
claims in his article, the sublime is not petrified in the solidity of some identity
without the Other. Rather, the sublime is seen as the ability to avoid
formlessness without consolidating into a form. This ability is realized in the
act of sublime Labour, or hammering ones self, and not in the reproductive
operation of memory. For Nietzsche, similarly, the problem of the sublime is
the problem of its categorization in the classic formulations which are too
foreseeable and normative. Nietzsches sublime is always excessive, more than
itself, a rejection of all thought of self-identity achievable in the downward
movement which he calls descent towards visibility.
Claire Hobbs reads Blake and Walter Benjamin as collectors of minute
particulars, of proverbs or detachable quotations which are not so much
repetitions of something else but reproductions which always already mean
something else and whose use does not preserve the past but puts the past to
use in the present Dealing with particulars we thus always already deal with
something else, with the another of Blakes The most sublime act. Read as
an act, or an action, the sublime in Blake and Benjamin subverts the action
suspending and powerless (or even helpless) sublime feeling of Burkes or
Kants. By reinstating particularity in an invincible concern for an other
both Blake and Benjamin also break with the transcendentalny of the sublime,
its movement towards the formless whose aesthetization by the eighte
enth-century theorists of the sublime was a step towards fascisms aes
thetization of the politics of privation.
The notion of collecting features prominently in Zbigniew Bialas reading of
the sublime which is interpreted in a manner reversing, if not parodying, Kants
moralized concept of the sublime immensity. In Bialass paper the sublime, in
a characteristically postmodernist turn, is a concept where the aesthetically
excessive (e.g. accumulation of cliches) meets its ethical equivalent (the sublime
as the excess of desire resulting in the erotic obsession).
Commodifaction of the sublime traceable in cinema is also one of the
themes in Paul Coats essay on sublimity and film where the sublime is defined,
in Thomas Weiskels words, as the Oedipal defence against the ambivalence of
a wish to be inundated ahd a simultaneous anxiety of annihilation. Further,
central for Kants theory the separation of the beautiful from the sublime
marks the emergence of the male identity as independent from the mothers
domination.
Kants conflict, or war, of faculties and his writings on the sublime form
a theoretical background of J -F. Lyotards attempts at theorizing the post
modern. The sublime which, as unpresentable, could not be an object of
a reasonable philosophical investigation for Kant whose interests in nature
were interests in the totality of rules (as he defined it), becomes the sphere
which postmodernism attempts, however paradoxically, at putting in presen
tation itself. Tadeusz Rachwals essay traces such postmodern attempts
beginning with H. P. Lovecrafts The Unnamable (using Lovecrafts misspel
led version of the word) as a somehow anachronic expression of Lyotards
concern with the possibility that what is properly human might be inhabited by
the inhuman, and ending with Helene Cixous feminine voice as the voice
approaching the sublime without positing it as a distinct category. Though, as
she claims, her voice is a voice which has not sublimated, it is exactly in the
refusal to being categorized that her I will Yes can only go on and on,
without ever inscribing or distinguishing the contours in a writing without
distance, the notion which motivated the theoreticians of the sublime such as
Burke or K ant
To speak about the sublime must also touch upon a discussion of the human
perception and the inherent problem of the image transforming the reality of
immediate consciousness into a visual and intellectual judgement This relation
ship ofbeing and being represented lying at the foundation of the sublime must
attract semiotic analytical attention and, as Emanuel Prowers paper is trying to
demonstrate, the Peircean notion of the First comes in handy when investigating
the sublime as the metamorphosing power through which what is unsusceptible
of mediation is rendered as interpretable (like Witkacys Pure Form, for
instance, whose programmatic immediacy, as Marta Zajc argues, makes it
possible to relate it to the concept of the sublime).
Looking at the notion of the sublime in Langlands Piers Plowman, Andrzej
Wicher argues that in the Middle Ages this notion was highly suspect on
ethical rather than aesthetic grounds. The source of the suspicion was mans
yearning for infinity and immortality whose manifestations could always be
of the devils making. Hence the necessity of distinguishing between the true
sublime and the false sublime which, on moral and religious grounds, is of
vital importance as decisive about mans damnation or salvation. Langlands
metaphysical suspiciousness reflected in Piers Plowman seems to result from
his consistent attempts at unmasking the false sublime, at devising a reliable
method of distinguishing between the true and the false sublime.
The theorization of the sublime on the aesthetic grounds in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries finds its reflection in the writings which become
centered on the question of the landscape and a variety of literary and painterly
conventions which worked towards the invention of vertiginous images of
sublime power operating both within Gothic and Romantic traditions as well
as in the practice of Thomas Cooks organized tourism. The focus on the
sublime in Gothic fiction as well as its rigorous exclusion in modern detective
fiction both spring, as David J arrett claims in his paper, from explorations of
the Romantic Sublime reinvigorated in the nineteenth century in the Victorian
context of imperial expansionism.
I t is with the task of approaching all these (and many more) issues (which as
hinging on the threshold of the unpresentable or the unnameable cannot be
a subject of a presentation pure and simple) that we present this volume to the
Reader.
Tadeusz Rachwal & Tadeusz Sawek
GEOMETRY and the SUBLIME:
Imagination and the Closure of Creativity
University of Sydney
NOEL GRA Y
For Immanuel Kant, there is a point at which the imagination is required
to forego its ability to produce or create images. A particular moment whereat
the imagination recoils back upon itself and reaches its limit by being unable to
issue-up an image of that which Kant says has no limit, namely, infinity or
absolute greatness or absolute extension. This actual experience of being
unable to represent in the mind an image of absolute greatness, which in turn
brings to consciousness the superiority of reason over the senses, Kant
characterizes or names as Sublime. In his 3rd critique, the Critique of
Judgement, Kant speaks of this experience as that moment, at which, the mind
is incited to abandon sensibility (CJ : 92)1.
As the imagination in his schema is to be understood as the highest plane of
the sensible, the highest realm of the image, and as all images in this schema are
thought of as having a finite extension, either ethereally so to speak, at the level
of the imagination, or materially at the level of the empirical qua perceptual,
then it follows that this sublime moment whereat the imagination recoils back
upon itself and foregoes its image making task is also the moment where
geometry must forsake its dominion; must equally withdraw as it reaches its
corresponding limit to speak of extension; a point whence-from geometry is no
longer able to visualize the truth to space qua the image, other than to
acknowledge a certain pictorial exhaustion, or merely stand in a certain awe.
At this point and within the logic of the third critique, we might so easily
say that, geometry becomes blind. Or more exactly, it is precisely because of the
limits of the representational powers that attend this Kantian imagination, that
is generated what appears to be a geometrical exhaustion; a reaching out by his
1CJ Critique of Judgement, trans. J .C. Meredith (1986).
imagination, at the level of its geometrical identity, that erases its own image
making task and in so doing serves to grant as we will see, a certain privilege to
the higher reaches of intellection qua Kantian reason.
Of course it will come as no surprise to anyone to say that, perceiving the
imagination as something that stands in an architectonic fashion between
intellection and perception and that acts to privilege in one way or another the
upper reaches of intellection, has certainly enjoyed a long history in the
discourses of philosophy and geometry. As indeed, has the idea that the
imagination is a seemingly endless productive or creative plane for the
generation of images on one hand, yet on the other hand, and more often that
not, co-extensively, the imagination has also been argued to have limitations
and/or defaults with respect to its representational and veracious powers.
For instance, a case in point, and one that stands as a formative moment
for the whole idea of a generative imagination with attending limitations, is
that of the ancient schema proposed by Proclus. A schema that I have argued
elsewhere2 is an attempt by Proclus to resolve an important difficulty
confronting the Platonic system, concerning where to situate geometrical
figures. However, rather than rehearse the features of this resolution again, let
us on this occasion look instead at one or two of the elements of the basic
structure of Proclus schema3with a view to laying the ground so to speak, for
an examination of Kants critique of the imagination.
Thus so and to speak very briefly, Proclus granted the imagination an
inter-mediate status between intellection and perception. With the imagination
being understood by him as that which gives form to, or serves to image the
pure ideas residing in the Platonic Nous or unitary upper reality. These pure
ideas, which Proclus argues are undifferentiated and universal, are projected
down from the Nous onto his geometrical screen or plane of the imagination
whereupon they gain a pictorial expression as differentiated austere figures,
sometimes referred to as the geometricals.
Furthermore, in Proclus schema because the Nous or higher reality is
nceived of as a partless whole or totality, then extension in this upper reality
> only in the form of a potentiality, not in the form of specific differentiations
or limits. Hence, for Proclus, the Platonic upper reality partakes of no images
and thus by definition, partakes of no geometry. This latter point of the
Platonic higher reality or the upper realm of purity so to speak, being image
free, re-appears in Kants schema, as we will have cause to witness directly.
However, it is worth drawing the distinction that, although Kant and Proclus
2 The Image of Geometry, Persistence qua Austerity-Cacography, and the Truth To Space
(pending publication).
3For a general discussion on Proclus, see pp. XVXLIIL, and, with regard to our interests
concerning the geometrical imagination, see pp. 198, both in Proclus: A Commentary on the First
Book of Euclid's Elements, G. R. Morrow, Uans. (New J ersey: Princeton University Press, 1970).
both attribute in slightly different ways a certain universal inter-Subjectivity to
the images inhabiting their respective geometrical imaginations, Kant for his
part, makes no suggestion that geometric images in the imagination are to be
thought of as actual projections down from a higher realm of unattainable
purity; quite the contrary: purity for Kant is precisely given to the imagination
in the form of his transcendental aesthetic which he tells us in the first critique
is an a priori pure intuition which constitutes, as he says, the two pure
forms of sensibility... namely, space and time (CR: 61)*.
Finally, in Proclus schema the mathematical or geometrical imagination is
understood as a productive or generative plane whose austere figures, coupled
to precise rules of demonstration, act to privilege, as exemplars from and
through which one might glimpse, if at all, the undifferentiated essentialities
that are argued to govern and inform the higher reality of Platonic Being. By
definition, understanding these austere figures as exemplars is to understand
them as only approximating more or less the purity of Platonic ideas, and thus
as such, they come to privilege the Platonic higher dominion of purity or what
Proclus sometimes refers to as the upper reaches of intellection. Henceforth by
definition, the geometrical imagination is thus thought of as having represen
tational limits in being only able to generate exemplars, only able to
approximate purity. Thus, geometry, has the endless task ever laying before it
of seeking a unification by narrowing the margins of what will count as
difference by striving to perfect again and again its measuring techniques of
defining difference5.
So, to quickly bring all this into focus: Kants schema broadly resembles the
Proclion one in that he grants, like Proclus, a hierarchical order or structure to
intellection, imagination and perception, albeit that Kant is not overly
interested in the Proclion idea of intellection projecting itself more or less onto
the screen of the imagination. More importantly for our concerns, Kant, like
Proclus, profits the imagination as a force that privileges at a certain point
* CR Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (1986).
Of course we are all aware that Kant understood this a priori geometry as being Euclidean,
and thus, with the advent of other geometries, the scientific attention towards his theory of space
with its Euclidean overtones, has diminished considerably; although equally, his theory still exerts
a considerable influence on many contemporary theorizations of the aesthetic. However, as I have
discussed in The Image of Geometry, Kants theory of space, in my view, still has a great deal to
offer critical discourses of science and the arts with regard to the question of the possible necessary
relation between geometry and any thinking, apprehension, or production of space.
5 As an aside, we may see here the legacy and continuing purview of geometry as that which
defines difference at the self-same moment that it is grounded in a programme of unification. Or
more exactly, geometry, thought in the Proclion terms as an off-spring o or projection down from
a higher unchanging unity, is then led to define difference ultimately towards a reunification; hence,
geometry defines the parts as it ever strives to re-unite these self-same parts into a unified whole or
totality.
the higher reaches of intellection; albeit once again, in contrast to Proclus
geometrical screen of impure approximations, Kant sees this privileging as being
largely generated at that point that the imagination reaches its representational
limits with respect to its failure to generate a specific image of infinity. In other
words, for Kant, on this occasion, it is precisely the finite limits of the
representational power of the imagination, and not any possible impurity of its
attending images, that informs his programme of ascribing a higher value to
what he understands as the upper reaches of the minds activities.
Thus so, and from within the logic of Kants schema of an inter-mediate
imagination with all its attending representational limits, coupled to the
imaginations role of privileging the upper reaches of intellection by the
exhaustion of the imaginations representational powers, the following question
may perforce be raised:
Namely, how are we to think this Kantian place that marks the edge of
geometrys dominion; this Kantian imagination that is forced in a manner of
speaking, to erase at a particular moment its image making task? How, in
other words, are we to think a blind imagination, one apparently bereft of an
image. That is, an imagination specifically at the level of its geometrical identity
that is apparently stalled in its production by a failure to image infinity or
absolute extension. Which is to say within our concerns, a geometrical
imagination apparently bereft of geometry?
In short, how are we to think this Kantian imagination which in being
stretched to its utmost representational limits, must then stare out with blind
eyes over an unimaginable, or more precisely, a seemingly unimageable infinity;
an imagination, for Kant, that recoils back upon itself and, for a brief vibrant
moment, seems to lose its productive or creative vision? And let me add that,
nesting or enfolded within this question is a matter that, in my view, goes deep
into the very arcana of philosophy and of geometry with respect to their
traditional division of intellection, imagination and perception: namely, can the
image ever be successfully separated-out from the conceptual, or more exactly
and to phrase it in a reverse fashion, to what degree is the image an ever present
contaminative force in any conception that profits itself as image-free? And I use
the word contamination, decidedly so that we may keep in the forefront of our
minds the dangers of a fall into radical empiricism that ever faces contemporary
geometry with its privileging of perception, and/or, the dangers of a fall into
radical idealism that characterizes much of traditional geometry with its affection
for homeomorphisms6. Conversely, the portal of empiricism ever stands before
us, in any unproblematic collapsing of the empirical and the ideal7.
* * *
6See p. 68 in. M. Serress Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, J . Harrai & D. Bell, eds.
(Baltimore: J ohn Hopkins University Press, 1982).
7See Derrida in Leavey: 1978: 77, regarding unproblematical dissolving of the empirical and
ideality und unproblematical separation. Also on this point, see Bemet in Silverman: 1989: 141.
a
To explain the processes involved in the imaginations apparent fall into
pictorial darkness or at the very least a pictorial despair, Kant begins by
telling us that in the ordinary employment of our sensibilities we may de
rive or grasp immediately that an object, comprised of units, has extension,
that it is a quantum. This immediate taking hold-of or grasping is what he calls
an aesthetic estimation. Which, in the most general sense, means that the
Subject is able to form immediately in his or her imagination a mental
representation or image of the totality of any object in question with re
spect to its magnitude or size. The imagination intuits size absolutely might
be another way of saying the same thing, as indeed Richard Klein has so
aptly expressed i t8. Or, in more vernacular terms: one can see immediately
that everything has a size, or, one can perceive in a direct manner from
any object itself that it has a magnitude. Thus, for Kant, it is not necessary in
an ordinary everyday sense to compare any object in question with other
objects in order to determine immediately that any particular object has
a magnitude.
However, to express any objects magnitude or extension mathemati
cally, which is to say to express it as a quantity, as numerically specifically
this and not that extension, requires a system of related units of mea
sures grounded in the process of an infinite chain of comparisons. In short,
for Kant, all logical or mathematical measures are themselves dependent
upon another measure ad infinitum and, hence, there is no first or funda
mental measure (CJ : 98). Therefore, when we do speak of something as
a fundamental unit of measure, and we are constantly obliged to do so
Kant tells us, in order to avoid an infinite regress, then on such an oc
casion we initially and immediately determine its magnitude by evoking an
aesthetic estimation.
In other words, we start all measuring by referring to a given standard but
this standard itself, by definition of being taken as so given, is self-referential: it
is to be compared only with itself. For this to be possible, logically necessitates
the demand that we are able to grasp immediately in our imaginations the
magnitude of the given standard without any comparisons with other object or
units. Hence, for Kant, this necessity to adopt and accept a given standard in
order to begin measuring at all, comes to mean, as he goes on to say, that all
estimation of the magnitude of objects of nature is in the last resort aesthetic,
which further means, for Kant, that such magnitudes are subjectively and not
objectively determined, (CJ : 98). Which, by definition, also must come to mean
that geometry, in its reliance on a set of fundamental figures or images of
magnitudes with which to ply its trade or carry out its applications, is also, in
the last resort grounded in a Kantian aesthetic estimation. Which further
8See, p. 35, in. R. Kleins, Kants Sunshine, in Diacritics, voL 11 (1981).
means for Kant, that geometry at its most formative moment is also
subjectively not objectively determined9.
Following on from this, Kant tells us that to speak of anything as
absolutely great, which is to say, great beyond comparison, it makes no sense
then, in so speaking, to seek an appropriate standard outside itself, but merely
in itself (CJ : 97). I t is a greatness, he says, which is comparable to itself
alone, and hence, he adds, it comes that the sublime is not to be looked for
in the things of nature, but only in our own ideas (CJ : 97). Which, once again
to speak in the vernacular, means that for Kant, we may think the idea of
infinity, or more precisely, think the idea-infinity, but we cannot image infinity
to ourselves. We cannot issue-up to ourselves an image of absolute greatness;
however for Kant we can certainly conceive of the idea of absolute greatness.
Once again by definition, geometry also falls out of this equation, for, as all
measures for Kant, are in the last resort aesthetic, which is to say image-bound,
which is to say finite, then, to make any claim for the possibility of measuring
absolute greatness qua a geometry of infinity would lead logically to the less
than attractive event of absolute greatness or infinity being ultimately reducible
to some finite unit of measure and/or ultimately reducible to a finite shape.
Of course, if absolute greatness is comparable only to itself, then within
Kants logic it may also be thought of as the absolute fundamental measure if
we accept his proviso that all fundamental measures can only be so given as
9 I t is interesting to note that the contemporary geometer, Benoit Mandelbrot, in his
enterprise of arguing that Fractal geometry constitutes a radical departure from traditional
geometry, appears to owe a partial debt to this Kantian idea that the estimation of the magnitude
of objects is in the last resort aesthetic; albeit that this idea undergoes something of a transfor
mation and reemerges firstly as Mandelbrots claim that his fractal geometry mirrors Natures own
geometry and secondly, in his famous adage: to see is to believe, B. B. Mandelbrot Fractal
Geometry of Nature, New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983, p. 21. The transformation I am alluding to
here, is that Mandelbrot reverses the polarity of Kants idea by suggesting that Fractal geometry is
immediately or intuitively obvious precisely because it is Natures own geometry. Hence we might
care to say that, for Mandelbrot, Fractal geometry is the very stuff that the perceptual world is
made of. Or more exactly, in Mandelbrots sense of understanding perception as referring to
a certain unproblematical immediacy, this self-same perception is to all intents and purposes,
merely the subjective expression of Natures objective Fractal face.
What in fact Mandelbrot does in order to effect this reversal, at the same time leaving in place
the Kantian immediacy of an aesthetic estimation, is simply to shift the a priori base of geometry,
understood by Kant as extension and figure, from being an internal qua Subjective condition of
possibility for any apprehension of space, to one located externally in the world of Nature and
understood by Mandelbrot as an iterative process gaining its expression in the form of fractals.
Which is to say that, in Mandelbrots schema, geometry still retains the status of an a priori for any
apprehension of space, except that, it is now a material or empirical a priori wherein the Subject is
forever immersed. Or to be more exact, perception for Mandelbrot, thus fits or conforms to the
world, precisely, because the Subject qua perception is a type of micro or local example of the
mcrof or universal fractal world of Nature. Thus in a manner of speaking, and mindful that I am
being now less than precise when I say that, for Mandelbrot, it is the Subject which is embedded in
geometry, not so much geometry embedded in the Subject.